Raquel Salas Rivera

Raquel Salas Rivera (Mayagüez, 1985) is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and editor. His honors include being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, the New Voices Award from the Festival de la Palabra, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry, the inaugural Ambroggio Prize, the Laureate Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to translate the poetry of his grandfather, Sotero Rivera Avilés. He is the author of six full-length poetry books, which have been longlisted and shortlisted for the National Book Award, the Pen America Open Book Award, and the CLMP Firecracker Award. He has co-edited two anthologies of Puerto Rican poetry, Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019) and La piel del arrecife (La Impresora, 2022), various folios, and the literary journal The Wanderer. In 2016, he became a founding member of the Yerbamala Collective, a group dedicated to the creation of antifascist poetic spells. Also in 2022, he will participate in no existe mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first scholarly exhibition focused on Puerto Rican art to be organized by a large U.S. museum in nearly half a century, whose title borrows a verse his fourth poetry book while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds, LLC, 2019). He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and lives, teaches, and writes in Puerto Rico. With a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, he works as investigator and head of the translation team for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/ The Puerto Rican Literature Project (PRLP), a free, bilingual, user-friendly and open access digital portal that anyone can use to learn about and teach Puerto Rican poetry.

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